Until these people sprung him.
Papers signed, deals made, favors swapped, money exchanged—whatever happened behind the scenes, he didn’t care. All that mattered to him was that the door to his cell rolled back like a stone from a tomb.
Later, they explained to him everything that would be required of him, but he barely listened because if the choice was do this or go back into a tomb, then that wasn’t really a choice at all. He remembers feeling . . . exhilarated, somehow, or heartened, maybe, sitting in the room in his jumpsuit, as they detailed their requirements, because finally someone had recognized a proper way to channel his, shall we say, enthusiasm. And all this after Dietrich had lasted less than a year in the military, even though the military had seemed like the perfect fit for him, everyone thought so. Lots of space and sand and emptiness and ammo and plenty of targets to choose from. They say they want you crazy, but they don’t really want you crazy. Not Dietrich crazy. Sure, they’ll overlook a certain amount of enthusiasm, but Dietrich doesn’t have a certain amount of anything, and he certainly doesn’t have a small amount of that.
An asshole lawyer—this was before the concrete closet and the piss hole and NO HUMAN CONTACT—once described him to a judge as dead-eyed and remorseless, and as he sat beside the lawyer in his borrowed suit, all his tattoos covered and muted, he thought, Well that is the most inaccurate statement I have ever heard. Remorseless, maybe, he’d grant the lawyer that, for how can a man truly know if he feels remorse? Having presumably never felt it?
So remorseless, maybe. But dead-eyed? No, sir. That is demonstrably not accurate.
Dietrich’s seen many things. He’s done many things. Through it all, his eyes have been very much alive.
He should have asked that lawyer before he killed him, Tell me, do my eyes look dead to you? As it was, it took two days for Dietrich to get the reek of that lawyer’s cologne off his hands. It’s hard to strangle someone when you’re wearing handcuffs, but not impossible. If you’re enthusiastic.
Kill your own lawyer and you’ll wind up in prison. Kill a guard and you’ll wind up in solitary.
Do the kinds of things that Dietrich’s done and, apparently, you’ll wind up here. In a town like this.
Waiting.
Luckily, in prison, he had his tattoos to keep him company. All these prior recipients of his attention. Twenty-three, at last count, or a torso and two arms’ worth. The lawyer was number nineteen. The guard was number twenty. Each one of them, immortalized in ink and lovingly memorialized. Men, women, a few children, nearly two dozen faces, all smiling beatifically, their eyes turned up toward him, their likenesses etched over ribbons, flowers, dates. Some of them he knew for years, some he knew for a moment. But always the defining moment, he likes to think.
His dead. They travel with him everywhere.
He twists his torso before the mirror to inspect the latest additions, healing under the large white bandage on the small of his back. The flesh beneath still tender. He peels the bandage away. It was hard to find a virgin patch of skin to fit three new faces in.
Three faces: the sheriff and his two deputies.
Getting them done already, before he even arrived here, was premature, he acknowledges that, and cocky, too, but we all need to be a little bit cocky sometimes. And it’s not like he expected there to be a tattoo parlor in this godforsaken outpost.
The others he’ll just have to try to remember, once he’s done.
When he’s finished here, he won’t have an inch of blank skin left to cover.
There’s a knock at his door. Dietrich reattaches the bandage, pulls on his white linen shirt, then opens the door. It’s one of the agents. The spiky-haired one. He’s carrying a large black case. He’s wearing sunglasses and has a toothpick jostling around in his mouth like a fool. Dietrich recalls a time in the prison yard before solitary when they still let him mix with people, when he plucked a toothpick from a man’s mouth, then used it to put out both the man’s eyes.
“About time,” Dietrich says.
“Dick Dietrich? Is that what they’re calling you now?”
“Let me ask you something, and be honest,” says Dietrich. “Does that sound like a Negroid name to you?”
Rigo ignores the question and steps into the bungalow, toting his large black case, and Dietrich closes the door behind him. “I understand you’ve been causing some trouble, Dick, since you’ve arrived,” says Rigo. “The sheriff asked me to check in on you personally. He seems very worried about you. Oh, and I brought you a present.”
He sets the black case on the coffee table and steps away from it. Dietrich opens it. Pulls out the AR-15 he finds inside. Hefts it to his shoulder. Sights it.
“Is this it?” he asks.
“You need more?”
“God gave me two trigger fingers,” Dietrich says. “I don’t like to leave one idle.”
Rigo hands him a 9 mm pistol from his waistband. “That’s mine, so take good care of it.” He looks around the modest bungalow. “You ever gone canned hunting, Dick? It’s a very popular activity out here in Texas. You go to someone’s ranch, some huge parcel of land somewhere that’s all fenced off, and then they loose a bunch of livestock for you to hunt down. Deer, elk, bears, whatever you request.”
“That doesn’t sound very sportsmanlike,” says Dietrich.
“No, but it has its appeal,” says Rigo. “By the way, that thing with the dogs—that was excessive, even for you.”
“They weren’t dogs. They were coydogs.”
Rigo sucks on his toothpick. “What’s the difference?”
“You told me to sow chaos. I sowed chaos.”
“I didn’t tell you to set animals on fire.”
“The opportunity presented itself.”
“And while we’re on the subject,” says Rigo, “when eight-year-old boys vandalize a place, they don’t typically write Damnatio Memorae on the wall. Were you just being cute, or were you trying to get caught?”
“I don’t see how it matters either way,” says Dietrich. He’s focusing on that toothpick. He’s starting to feel annoyed. One benefit of solitary is that you don’t have to answer other people’s idiotic questions. “So when do we get this party started?”
Rigo turns and looks this man over, with his shaved head and his cockeyed smile and his loony tattoos. He seems every bit as crazy as they had been promised. Or warned. Sometimes, it’s so hard to tell the difference.
“The boy. And the sheriff. They’re off-limits,” Rigo says.
“Fuck me. The sheriff, too?” says Dietrich. “He and I have a real rapport.”
“He’s with us.”
“Does he know that?”
“Not yet.”